Editors' Review

It slows down your browsing. It makes some Web sites inaccessible for no discernible reason. And you don't get to leave with even a single solitary souvenir. But if you want to know what life behind the Great Firewall of China is like, then the Firefox plug-in China Channel is the cheapest and fastest way to experience using the Internet in China without actually being there.

After installation, getting to experience Web surfing the way the Chinese do isn't hard at all. Users have three ways to activate China Channel: via the China Channel toolbar, a navigation bar button that you must drag and drop onto the bar to get access to, and a status bar button. The buttons function by opening a menu, from which you choose to switch from None to the China Channel. Much like the IE Tab extension, the page will then render as if your IP address is inside China.

The toolbar is interesting for a slightly different workflow that results in a Web page that informs you of your IP address and its country of origin. Choose the China Channel from the drop-down, and then hit the big red Go button. With China Channel activated, the page will declare that the plug-in has been activated. Switch back to None and refresh the page, and it changes to reflect your proxy server-free surfing experience. This is a great experiential plug-in that's worth grabbing just to see how citizens in countries with Internet censorship have to struggle with hamstrung browsing.

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Publisher's Description

The Firefox add-on China Channel offers internet users outside of China the ability to surf the web as if they were inside mainland China. Take an unforgetable virtual trip to China and experience the technical expertise of the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (supported by western companies).

It's a good experience for people who take Freedom of Speech for granted.

Cons

It occasionally disconnected from the proxy server, and need to reconnect back to the add-ons' home page

Summary

I'm from Hong Kong, and often make trip to China to visit some friends there. Although Internet Cafe are popular, but most people lived in cities like Beijing, Shanghai or Wuhan and Guangzhou do have Internet Access at home also. So, no it's not about public censorship, at least I do not experience any censorship at my home in California vs. friends' home in China. Also, the purpose of the US public library, or companies setup filter is to prevent people use these public/share assets to do something illegal online. I do not recall I've any problem viewing news from foreign countries bashing president Bush, or reporting the death toll from War of Iraq when I use these public Internet.

On the other hand, the Chinese firewall, purposely setup to prevent the Chinese citizen gaining access to any news that might had negative impact to the government. If you know anyone who is an active Internet user inside China, he/she will tell you how fierce is the battle between the user finding new oversea proxy server, and the government adding the list of these proxy sites.

Here is a blog post I found in Baidu (a very popular Chinese search engine) http://hi.baidu.com/firesnoby/blog/item/c04dd0ce432ac60293457eed.htmlOf-course it's written in Chinese, but you can always use Google translate to translate the page.

Provides good first-hand experience for those who never experienced severe internet censorship at school or at their workplace.

Cons

You have to click and download for something that's already implemented in much of our public access computers, a rather pointless thing to do i must say.

Summary

When you think about the fact that most chinese are using public accessable computers in internet cafes, like the ones we use at the library and other public places, you couldn't help but wonder how similar we are to them when it comes to internet censorship.

Updated on Oct 30, 2008

Instead of trying to give people with no internet censorship a chance to see what things would be like it the situation differed, why not try make a firefox add-on that let's those who have internet censorship on their computer see how easy it is to surf freely? I think the publishers would get better reward for their effort once they actually achieved something of use.

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